A Scary Amount of Detail is Being Revealed By the Chilcott Iraq War Inquiry

“It has to be emphasised that regime change in Iraq was official US policy. It went back to the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, passed unanimously by the Senate, by an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives, and signed into law by Bill Clinton in October 1998. So regime change and, to quote the act, “to establish a programme to support a transition to democracy in Iraq”, was an official American policy which George Bush inherited from Bill Clinton. The fact that Clinton did not do very much about it is neither here nor there.”Although the decision to invade Iraq is often depicted as one taken solely by Bush adminstration neocons, Meyer said the Bush regime was not an “aberration” and there was “more of a continuum with previous administrations” than either US party was willing to admit. While some blamed “the nutters” in the Bush administration for inventing the regime change policy, this was simply not true, he said.

Not that much of a reveal, but an example that US Foreign Policy, even if unlawful is not necessarily changed by elections.

“The real problem, which I did draw several times to the attention of London, was that the contingency military timetable had been decided before the UN inspectors went in under Hans Blix. So you found yourself in a situation in the autumn of 2002 where you could not synchronise the military timetable with the inspection timetable ? the result of that was to turn resolution 1441 on its head. Because 1441 had been a challenge to Saddam Hussein, agreed unanimously, to prove his innocence. But because you could not synchronise the programmes ? you had to short-circuit the inspection process by finding the notorious smoking gun ? and we ? the Americans, the British ? have never really recovered from that, because, of course, there was no smoking gun.”

This was one of the most damning points made by Meyer. After the UN security council unanimously passed resolution 1441 in November 2002, the high point of British efforts to secure an international consensus, Hans Blix’s weapons inspectors were admitted back into Iraq. But by that stage the US military was preparing for war in January (although the invasion did not start until March). Blix never had time to complete the inspection process and Meyer implies that the process was therefore something of a charade.

War was on the agenda no matter what happened. No real weapons inspection, no evidence of any weapons of any level of destruction, just a desire to get rid of a Leader that the US and UK Government did not like. Regime change. Completely illegal and nothing more than a war crime. Agreed because two men in high office both used the same tooth paste.